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"To Save and Preserve?"
It was already for the 15th time that this amazing town hosted between 7-11 June 2011 the International Festival "To Save and Preserve". It was my pleasure - and honour - to be invited there and present our own work at the section "The Festival of Festivals").
Khanty-Mansiysk (Russia, Western Siberia) lies 522 km east from the ridge line of the Ural Mountains, on the 61st parallel, at the fork of the Irtysh and the Ob River. Only 800 km separates it from the Arctic Circle. The first settlement was set up here in 1930 and ten years later it received its present name. In 1989, it already had 34 thousand inhabitants, 3 years later - 54 thousand and in 2010 - 74 thousand. At present, the population counts about 85 thousand people. The university as well as a number of other schools of higher education and - let's be honest - the huge wealth of this town attracts young people. A wonderful, modern museum was created here within only 2 years!
The bright sun illuminated the immaculately white new buildings and countless birch groves and you should know that the local birch trees have unbelieavably white trunks. It was really hot - one day the temperature in the shadow reached +39C.
Here and there we could see some old and shattered, very low wooden houses of Khants or Mansi - two, nearly extinct now, indigenous people of this region. Their language is close to Hungarian, hence the festival's website: www.ugoria.tv. In fact, these brown little huts and everything related to them were of more interest to us (except for nature) than all those elegant stations, banks and hotels. In close neighbourhood, there are still a few villages consisting of such dwellings and inhabited by the natives. It is a pity that we didn't manage to get there.
I must mention here the traditional Russian or rather Siberian (and that means more!) hospitality and our "little angels", as we called them, - wonderful girls who were taking care of us and did everything we asked or wished for. Always elegant and smiling, they were equally fluent in Russian, English and Ukrainian in its old version, from the pre-kolkhoz times.
We managed to see some countryside (spring floodplains were too shallow for a ship to get to Khant and Mansi settlements). A group of women in their Sunday best, traditional outfits encouraged us with their singing and dancing to take a walk along an ecological path leading among huge cedars. It was a little bit for the show, but when I was alone with them I heard a very moving story about how people should live and it wasn't about material goods.
A half-an-hour promotion session of our festival, which we had never had before, took place in a big hall filled with people. I talked about our goals and plans, our achievements and failures. We want to show films of high artistic value - it can't just be a lesson written with a camera. Only a good, emotional film, which tells an interesting story will be remembered and its message will be easier to accept. Unfortunately, we are still not treated as "real film makers" even in our own filming environment and this kind of approach has all kinds of consequences.
For many years we have also been fighting with evil and we've even had some success. Unfortunately, several years of efforts to protect all species of birds which are massively and cruelly killed during their flight over the Pyrenees have not brought any effect yet. Will we ever get a response to the appeal to President Obama we sent a year ago asking him to put an end to the slaughter of pure-blood buffalo in Yellowstone - the oldest national park in the world?
To illustrate my words, I showed short fragments from 6 films awarded at the last festivals. Indeed, this film set could make a big impression. So, we were approached by people from different countries and small states created after the collapse of the USSR, who gave us DVDs with their films - for our festival. Among them, there are several or maybe even more than a dozen good films. But I also got discs with TV programmes or information about ecological issues. "What, on earh, am I supposed to do with that?" - I kept asking them. "Our festival is only about nature films". - Please, just put it in your catalogue - said the former citizens of the Soviet Union. - We just want to have a chance to appear in the world... - And I felt uneasy.
And then Małgorzata came to my rescue. Giving her the floor, I would like to thank my old and new friends, everybody we met in this Siberian town, for their kindness. I also want to thank the organizers for the beautiful show closing this extraordinary meeting!
